Much to the vexation of my
partner, and not that Stewart Lee cares (or pretends to care), nor that he
wants my attention or praise, but I have a lot of time for comedian, producer,
writer and director Stewart Lee, even after considering this review. Not counting reading time, I’ve recently
committed 12 hours to watching, for free, his entire Comedy
Vehicle* on the iPlayer from start to finish, and have illegally
downloaded** and watched nearly all of his available DVDs. I enjoy enormously his
regular BJ-lampooning opinion pieces in the Observer (which I read for free
online) and I paid 50p in a charity shop for his first annotated
collection of scripts (one of which was from a show in Chapter Arts Centre
in Cardiff in which I suspect I was an unsuspecting audience member). I’ve not yet
made headway in finding a cheap bootleg copy of Jerry
Springer: The Opera but it’s on my bucket list. Therefore, I was
pleasantly surprised to find this book, his first (implying there’ll be another,
as yet unrealised) novel on the charity bookshelves of my local and favourite pub***,
again, modestly priced at 50p.
You might therefore
believe I was pre-disposed to like it, especially considering what good value for
money it represented.
I can however, honestly
and hand-on-heart, say I was underwhelmed.
With Lee, it’s hard to
know where his uniquely crafted shows end and the real, or if you like,
non-show Lee begins. He has mentioned on occasion during performances that he
is interested in the Hopi Indian peoples of North and Central American,
particularly their ancient Pueblo or sacred clown traditions, and although at
the time I didn’t think he’d done it for anything other than pseudo-intellectual
comic effect, he’s only gone and written a novel with these traditions hovering
near the heart of it. The eponymous Perfect Fool could be one of a trio of individuals,
all portraying different aspects of a Pueblo clown – the naïve and confused amnesiac,
the stoned and transcendental acid-rocker, Bob the…. Hopi Clown. Or it could be
one of the knobs playing guitar in a Dire Straits tribute band called the
Sultans of Streatham.
No, on second thoughts, it’s
almost certainly Bob Nequatewa, the Hopi Indian clown.
The stories of these and
other characters, including a Mason hitman, a crazed religious sheriff on the
trail of a serial killer and a former porn star driving across America, all begin
separately and unconnected, but eventually converge on an aircraft hangar in Arizona,
and the discovery of a secret so huge it could turn the world upside down. It’s
funny in places, although the so-called comic relief of Sid and Danny is least
funny of all, and it’s clear Lee really might have an interest in the clowning
traditions of Central America, but as a quest novel, it loses credibility, ironically,
when it turns out we’re expected to believe that the Holy Grail really was launched
into space in an attempt to protect the divine bloodline of Jesus Christ from corruption
and exploitation. Time for another peyote capsule methinks.
It’s not so bad that I’d
give up on Lee, but perhaps I had loftier ambitions for his literary career. I’d
even have accepted a dark and twisted offering a la Rob Newman, eschewing all
attempts at humour. But this feels a bit of an uncomfortable blend of slightly
ill-suited ingredients into a suspicious stew, and although I don’t feel strongly
enough against it to counsel avoidance, I was hoping for more.
Maybe instead of coming
over here, sullying our literary traditions and conventions with his intellect,
British comedy’s brightest and best mind should have stayed on the comedy
circuit and used his knowledge of Hopi Indian clowning techniques to make
British comedy more humorously prosperous….
*There’s no guarantee it’ll
still be available on the BBC iPlayer when you get around to clicking on that
link, but I live in hope.
**Just in case he is looking for praise and stumbles across this post…
***Picture credit to David
Oldham, July 2019, and screen-grabbed from Google Pictures relating to said
public house. Spot the author… No, not Stewart Lee, FFS.
(Paid link)
Comments
Post a Comment